Working with contracts can be complex, challenging, and constraining. Without a cohesive process, you can’t correctly work with contracts, leading to myriad problems, such as missed deadlines and increased liabilities that can hurt your company’s success. But managing contracts doesn’t have to be this way—it can be simple, easy, and streamlined. Now let’s look at five ways you can make working with contracts easier.
1. Use Contract Management System (CMS)
The first step is to store all your contracts in a contract management system. This centralized cloud service makes contracts accessible and reduces the likelihood of losing any vital information and documents.
A contract management system is where all your contracts, drafts, and templates are efficiently stored, enabling simplified sorting, searching, and filtering. You can edit, track, and review contracts instantly. CMS also makes the creation, analysis, negotiation, amendment, and signature of all your company’s legal contracts more efficient.
Multiple lawyers or departments can access any information they need when working with contract management software, whether in the office or remotely. For example, any lawyer with the necessary permissions can view a contract without searching through a filing system.
2. Use Contract Templates
Using contract templates and updating them regularly is highly advisable. It helps to cut down on administrative overhead. Templates ensure there are no mistakes in your contracts and avoid legal vulnerabilities. Without it, you will depend on your memory to build the contract!
Using contract templates lets you stay consistent and manage risks while saving time and money from your law department’s intervention. Use simplified language and less jargon to make the templates more user-friendly for your departments and your clients. Also, a good rule of thumb is to update contract templates every 3-4 months to stay updated.
3. Add Compliance Management to Your Administrative Tasks
A contract management strategy that seeks conformance with regulations and the performance of obligations within the agreement is called contract compliance. It ensures all contract parties are following through as they should in a legal manner.
Including checks of compliance regulations all through the contract, lifecycle is an excellent way to ensure that you aren’t left open to any legal risks. Go over the compliance requirements carefully. Any mistake you make would have an impact on your business. Therefore, it is best to have a compliance management strategy that is detailed enough for your organization to deliver.
4. Use Automation Software
Loio.com is a platform that lets you access contract analysis software and AI contract review software called Loio. This software makes it easy for lawyers and law firms to draft, review and collaborate on legal documents easily, faster, and more efficiently. It is built to make routine legal tasks easy and more comfortable. Loio also mitigates risks since it identifies mistakes and issues in crucial legal documents like contracts or motions, minimizing the financial or reputational damages.
Loio.com has been widely recognized as a platform to get powerful analytics tools for legal documents, including a mention by the G2 platform as a Top 3 Free Contract Analytics Software in 2021.
5. Determine How Contracts are Signed
Organizing a process for how contracts are signed is vital for minimizing disruption throughout a contract. If you are digitizing the contract management process, then it is necessary to use e-Signatures. They are legally binding, just like written signatures, but the good thing is that they can be integrated directly into your contract automation software or platform.
Most contract and document automation platforms have e-signing already incorporated in the software. Ensure you train your employees to be familiar with submitting e-signatures so that contracts can be signed off quickly. The easier your signing process is, the less time it will take to complete your contracts.
Conclusion
Working on contracts is essential for most businesses, but it can be challenging to stay on top of all the paperwork if you decide to do it yourself. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources and tools that can help make the process easier. Whether you’re a contract manager or a small business entrepreneur looking for an effective software solution for your business, Loio can efficiently handle your contract management workflows.
